Usually there's more to a ML, data-science idea (that's not a full fledged fledged out journal paper) than beating a SOTA benchmark.

In fact beating SOTA is often the least interesting part of an interesting paper and the SOTA-blind reviewers often use it as a gatekeeping device.

Sure, of course. Wasn't suggesting "are you beating a sota benchmark"? I'm floating the idea of an ablation that matches a realistic scenario for the dataset / task. Personally curious how manifold muon performs compared to AdamW in a throughly explored context. This is the first time I've seen a 3-layer mlp on cifar-10.

I probably should have made the 9-layer ResNet part more, front-and-center / central to my point.

Got you, this time.